One of the most powerful capabilities for enterprise migrations performed with MigrationWiz is the BitTitan SDK. When user numbers rise well into the thousands, even minor configurations or manual tasks quickly become significant barriers to efficiency and eat into project margins. Combining the native capabilities of MigrationWiz with the limitless possibilities of scripting enables a higher level of project customization, reporting, and management.

One person very familiar with the BitTitan SDK is Senior Partner Technical Strategist and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master Antonio Vargas. In his role, Antonio helps partners and IT pros plan and execute some of the largest, most complex projects we see. Antonio also maintains a detailed blog of his own regarding Exchange, Office 365, and Azure best practices.

In this post for Bits & Bytes, we’ve sourced Antonio’s top posts on PowerShell and the BitTitan SDK so you can learn more about these capabilities in MigrationWiz and consider how your organization might use scripting in an upcoming project. You can also learn more by visiting the BitTitan Help Center.

BitTitan SDK: Value for Enterprise Migration Projects

Antonio’s rationale for when to use scripts is simple: “Can I remove a lot of complexity and execution time if I run this task via PowerShell?”  If the answer is yes, do it! In this post, Antonio introduces readers to the value of the BitTitan SDK and the benefits of PowerShell for managing large enterprise projects.

BitTitan SDK: Retry Individual Errors for All Users in Document Migration Projects

Errors are inevitable. Learn how to automatically retry errors for all users within a project. Hours of repetitive work, saved once again through automation.

BitTitan SDK: Color Code MigrationWiz Project Users

How can you categorize 800 users in a project with 10,000? Instead of dividing users into separate projects, leverage the BitTitan SDK to automatically color code the right users and better manage your project.

BitTitan SDK: Connecting to the German Instance

BitTitan has multiple instances across the globe. Learn how to connect to our German environment in this quick tips post from Antonio.

The post BitTitan SDK and PowerShell: Tips from the Expert appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Most people know BitTitan for MigrationWiz, our SaaS-based data migration solution that paves the way for a seamless transition to Office 365. What we haven’t talked about as frequently is our ability to transition users and data into G Suite. As Google’s cloud office productivity offering continues to gain traction, there is a growing need for solutions to help with this migration – and existing first-party tools or other ISV offerings in this space just don’t cut it.

That’s how the BitTitan team found ourselves in San Francisco for Google NEXT ’19, the Sunnyvale giant’s largest conference of the year. We spent the week meeting new Google Cloud Service Partners, talking about the challenges and opportunities when it comes to G Suite migration projects, and how these partners are delivering a broader range of digital transformation services.

Flagship tech events are never short on product announcements and NEXT ’19 was no exception. Read on for the biggest stories of this year’s event, our takeaways on these announcements, and why we’re charging ahead into this ecosystem in 2019.

A Slew of Updates for G Suite

Google has been able to grow G Suite adoption by focusing on its simplicity and collaboration features while aggressively adding new features. NEXT ’19 saw no fewer than 14 additional capabilities integrated into G Suite, including support for Google Assistant, offline editing of Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as third-party connectivity for Cloud Search, available for the G Suite Enterprise customers.

Google has always been a data kingpin and many updates have to do with how to finds or pull in data to G Suite. Google’s BigQuery service now integrates with Sheets to form “Connected Sheets,” enabling users to work together on up to 10 billion rows of BigQuery data. Meanwhile, Drive search functionality has improved through the ability for users to create metadata categories and apply to any file in Drive for better discover and governance.

A complete list of G Suite enhancements and new features is available on the Google Cloud blog.

The Debut of Anthos

TechTarget’s Aaron Tan summarizes it best: “Billed as Linux for the cloud, Google’s Anthos multi-cloud management platform promises to make it easier for enterprises to manage their applications regardless of where they choose to run them – on different public cloud services or on-premise.”

Previously known as the Google Cloud Services Platform, Anthos was the premiere announcement at NEXT ’19. The open, build-once-run-everywhere attitude and compatibility with AWS and Azure is a bet Google is hoping will pay off in the coming years as hybrid cloud models continue to proliferate.

Learn more about Anthos in this Computer Weekly exclusive interview with Google employee #8 and current SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle.

A Strong First Show for Thomas Kurian

NEXT ’19 was also a public introduction for Thomas Kurian, the long-time Oracle exec who replaced Diane Green as Google Cloud CEO earlier this year. TK’s reception has been a warm one both publically and internally, judging by BitTitan’s conversations at the event. Anthos and other general infrastructure announcements place a prominent focus on Google’s cloud business in the coming year, while partner program and distributor investments on the G Suite side align with moves Microsoft made two to three years ago to push Azure and Office 365 consumption – a strategy that has helped it claw to #2 behind AWS.

Shortly after the conclusion of NEXT ’19, Google announced another high-profile hire: former SAP exec Robert Enslin, President of Global Customer Operations, a move many view as part of Google’s strategy to chase more enterprise business in 2019. TechCrunch has more.

MigrationWiz: Your Highway to G Suite

Based on booth conversations and partner meetings for BitTitan, MigrationWiz is well-positioned to help Google partners, particularly G Suite resellers, accelerate migrations from a wide range of Source environments.

Google has a series of first-party solutions that help address components of to-G Suite migrations, but none do so comprehensively or are a good fit for all project sizes. Anecdotally, existing third-party solutions in the Google ecosystem seem to deliver mixed results for partners, leaving the door open for a reliable solution with a simpler, bundled licensing model to better serve Google service partners.

MigrationWiz offers the ability to manage all project types (and sizes) from a single, easy-to-use interface with no local installations or professional services needed. Learn more about our to-G Suite capabilities in this overview or visit the BitTitan Help Center to access the most robust Knowledge Base and step-by-step guides catered to your scenario.

The post Google Cloud NEXT ’19: Here’s What You Missed appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Migrations to a cloud office suite are a key part of a broader digital transformation plan. They can also be a great source for project-based revenue with better-than-average margins – but only if you package the services correctly.

In a new white paper from BitTitan, we outline effective ways to position and sell the true value of your expertise instead of simply passing through the license cost. Learn how to increase margins and overall profitability ahead of your next project – download now via the link below.

The post White Paper: How to Market and Sell MigrationWIz appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

During large migrations with multiple project owners, it’s important all agents have visibility into the actions of their teammates. Last year, BitTitan introduced Project Sharing features to MigrationWiz to improve collaboration between agents of the same Workgroup. With Project Sharing, service providers or internal IT teams supporting migrations can see information such as total available licenses within a Workgroup, all the Workgroups to which a user belongs, every customer that has a MigrationWiz project associated with them, and more.

We’re now taking this reporting and auditing capability a step further with the introduction of Action Logging to better track steps taken by other agents in the same Workgroup, improving security and audit practices while simplifying reporting. Let’s dig into this feature.

Which Actions Are Captured?

Action Logging within MigrationWiz can be categorized in two ways: Workgroup Action Logs and Project Action Logs. Both types are enabled by default and independent of the Project Sharing feature.

Workgroup Action Logs

Action Logging is available at the Workgroup-based level for better management and visibility across the team. The following information is captured:

• Source Endpoint Edited: When, who, action, and both the old and new Source endpoints
• Add User to the Workgroup: When, who, action
• Remove User from Workgroup: When, who, action

Note that if an endpoint is deleted, the logs for that endpoint will not be included in the emailed log files.

Project Action Logs

Action Logging is available on a project-based level for smaller migrations or single project owners. This gives partners the opportunity to provide more granular detail to end-users about the project and demonstrate the combined efficiency of the partner’s services and MigrationWiz.

The following information is captured:

• Start Full Migration: When, who, action, item types, and the Source users selected for the full migration
• Stop Migration: When, who, action, item types, and the Source users selected to stop the migration
• Item Moved: When, who, action, Source SMTP
• Item Edited: When, who, action, Source SMTP
• Item Deleted: When, who, action, Source SMTP
• Advanced Options Updated: When, who, action

Note that for both logs, there may be a delay of up to 30 minutes before recent actions are listed. If you do not see expected actions listed in the report, wait 30 minutes and request again.

How can I export these logs?

The process for exporting Action Logs is simple yet slightly different for each type.

To export Workgroup Action Logs, sign in to your MigrationWiz account. From the Workgroup list on the Dashboard page, click on the page icon on the right for the corresponding log you would like to export. Clicking the send button will transmit a .csv file to your email.

To export Project Action Logs, sign in to your MigrationWiz account. From the My Projects bar, click on the graph bar icon from list on the right side of the page. Click OK to receive an email with the requested information.

Additional recipients may be added via Advanced Options > Notifications.

How long will BitTitan store logs?

BitTitan will store both types of logs for 180 days from the time the action was taken. After that, they will be deleted from the database.

In the event a customer deletes a project in MigrationWiz, the logs will be saved for 180 days before being deleted. If a customer would like access to these logs after deleting the project, they will need to contact BitTitan Support (support@bittitan.com).

For migrations performed via user impersonation, logs will be stored in the database but not displayed to the user.

Bonus Feature: Project Sharing and the BitTitan SDK

When Project Sharing was initially introduced in August 2018, the feature was only available through the MigrationWiz UI. This posed a challenge to our enterprise customers who relied on the SDK and scripting for project execution. With the launch of Action Logging, Project Sharing is now supported through the MigrationWiz UI as well as the SDK, offering customers the choice of how they would like to track and report on shared projects.

For more information regarding the BitTitan SDK, read this introduction in the Help Center.

More Advanced Options

Besides the capabilities highlighted in this post, MigrationWiz offers a host of other Advanced Options to help teams configure, launch, and manage migration projects. You can learn more about those options through the BitTitan Help Center or our on-demand webinar library.

The post Feature Spotlight: Project Sharing and Action Logging in MigrationWiz appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

BitTitan Customer Stories is a new series on Bits & Bytes highlighting successful migration projects delivered by BitTitan partners around the world. To view more case studies like these, visit the Customer Stories tab on our website. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Get in touch!

Meet the Partner: Orange Networks

Orange Networks GmbH is a 100% independent, industry-neutral strategic and technical IT consulting and service company with several locations in Germany. Orange Networks is one of the most important Microsoft partners in Germany for Microsoft Cloud and Microsoft Artificial Intelligence.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner in multiple categories, Orange Networks serves business partners and companies in Europe by helping their customers on their journey to digital transformation. In addition to the purely technical solutions, they also help customers digitally transform and adapt their workplaces and processes on the way to a Modern Workplace – including cloud adoption and modern collaboration.

In 2018, Orange Networks engaged with ThyssenKrupp Elevator, a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp AG and a global pioneer of industrial engineering and elevator technology, to transition more than 33,000 employees to Office 365. Over the course of five months, Orange Networks successfully migrated all users’ on-premises Exchange data to Office 365.

Business Requirements

ThyssenKrupp Elevator has more than 33,000 employees distributed globally with local IT departments operating their own on-premises email environments. This meant the subsidiary had 18 separate Source environments from which it needed to migrate mailboxes to Office 365. Overhead for the local installation of a migration tool in each environment would have greatly increased project costs, which led Orange Networks to look for a SaaS-based solution with no on-prem hardware or installations needed.

In addition, the complexity of migrating a subsidiary with this many individual Exchange instances in separate countries meant Orange Networks spent a significant amount of time consulting with and planning for the migration. This included performing trial migrations to test data transfer speeds, understanding how local firewalls interacted with the migration solution, and planning for technical support throughout the duration of the project.

Solution: Move with MigrationWiz

With the help of MigrationWiz and BitTitan technical partner strategists, Orange Networks completed the migration of over 33,000 subsidiary employees from their local Source environments to Office 365 in just five months – with minimal escalations post-cutover from end users.

Orange Networks selected MigrationWiz for several reasons. As a solution entirely based in the cloud, MigrationWiz requires no on-prem installations or hardware installed at the Source environment, reducing the time and complexity required to configure the project – in this case, saving Orange Networks from having to touch all 18 Source environments individually.

The SaaS architecture and central management console enabled Orange Networks to manage this global project and migrate users around the clock, increasing overall migration speeds and simplifying the transition to Office 365.

Because of the success of this migration, Orange Networks is now in talks with the customer for additional migration projects with user numbers in the tens of thousands.

“BitTitan enabled ThyssenKrupp Elevator to successfully migrate >33K mailboxes to Office 365 in five months,” said John Hemming, Head of GPI, IT Services & Security for ThyssenKrupp Elevator.

“Normally when we migrate users from Exchange On-Prem to Online, we do it using a classic hybrid structure – without a third-party tool,” says Hermann Kapfer, Principal IT Consultant at Orange Networks. “But with such a variety of AD regions, countries and users in a migration project, it is essential to use a tool like MigrationWiz. I don’t know how else we could have successfully managed such a complex migration project.”

Want to learn more about migrating from Exchange On-Prem to Office 365 with MigrationWiz? Watch our on-demand webinar below or check out other scenarios in our growing webinar library.

The post Orange Networks Migrates 33K+ Users for ThyssenKrupp Elevator Using MigrationWiz appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Product Release Notes contain information about updates, upgrades and new features for BitTitan solutions and services. For the most current information, visit the Product Announcements section in the BitTitan Help Center. For additional questions, visit the Community Forums.

MigrationWiz New Feature: Action Logging

MigrationWiz now provides an audit trail report for all actions done for your Workgroups and Projects. Refer below for actions that will be logged by MigrationWiz and included in the audit trail report. For more in-depth information, continue below or read our recent feature spotlight.

For Workgroup action logs, under the respective Workgroup, click on the corresponding ‘Request Workgroup Action Logs’ icon under Logs. An audit trail report will then be sent via e-mail.

For Project-based action logs, under the respective Project, click on the corresponding ‘Project Statistics’ icon and select ‘Email Project Action Logs’. An audit trail report will then be sent via e-mail.

Note that by default, both Workgroup and Project action logs are enabled. All logs will be stored for 180 days before being deleted. Project logs are only sent to the email address that is listed under your MSPComplete profile. If you would like to add additional recipients to receive the logs, you can add email addresses under the MigrationWiz project Advanced Options > Notifications sections.

Improvement: G Suite Error Message

As part of our ongoing efforts to simplify and improve error messages throughout the solution, we have altered the error message for G Suite endpoints when the Source domain address is changed to a domain that is not included in the original G Suite endpoint creation. Previously, a generic error message was displayed indicating a processing error. This message has now been updated to the following: “Email domain does not match the endpoint domain” so users are clearly aware of the error and can rectify immediately.

Improvement: Tenant to Tenant Coexistence Project Setup

We have added two new descriptions in product to assist with T2T coexistence projects.

First, we have added a descriptive liner above the T2T coexistence option to inform MigrationWiz users that if this functionality is enabled, all user accounts found on the Destination tenant will be deleted and recreated as mail-enabled accounts instead.

In addition, we have implemented a final confirmation step for T2T coexistence scenarios so MigrationWiz users can acknowledge and confirm their intent to proceed with this project. Once users check or enable T2T coexistence, a pop-up box will prompt that user to confirm this intent via text box.

Once users enter this text and click “Enable,” that MigrationWiz user can proceed with configuring their project.

Bug Fix: Coexistence and Public Folder Migrations

We addressed a bug whereby T2T coexistence was enabled for Public Folder projects between Office 365 tenants. Following this fix, T2T coexistence should not appear as an option for Public Folder projects and will correctly be available only during T2T mail projects.

The post April 2019 Product Release Notes appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

If a user leaves the company and their account is deleted, and/or their license is withdrawn, what happens with the business data in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business? 

We’ve discussed how to deal with terminated users in Office 365 in a previous post. But when SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are the Source and Destination, it can present a new set of obstacles. What migration methods exist that can handle such a scenario?

First, here’s an illustration that maps out the scenario:

For all team sites in SharePoint Online, the company has a storage of 10 GB + 500 MB for each user for free. Additional storage may be purchased.

In OneDrive for Business, each user with a license has 1 TB storage, and later on this year unlimited storage. The illustration shows that User A is a member of the Team Sites “Marketing” and “Support”. Additionally, User A also has shared folders and files with User B and C, but he is the owner.

The company does not have to pay for the the storage of OneDrive for Business. It is becoming increasingly popular to switch content to OneDrive without ultimately considering the consequences.

In our example, User A leaves the company. The administrator deletes User A in the Active Directory and/or withdraws the Office 365 license.

There is no problem with the two team sites because User A no longer exists. But in Office 365, there will be an automatic process initiated called “My Site Cleanup Job.” Microsoft has more details on this at KB 3042522.

The short version: Microsoft has two recommendations for saving the users content.

Recommendation 1

A work or school account is deleted from the Microsoft Office 365 admin center or is removed through Active Directory synchronization.

The account deletion is synchronized to SharePoint Online.

The OneDrive Clean Up Job runs, and the user profile is marked for deletion. The user profile will be preserved in the database in a deleted state for 30 days by default. This coincides with the time that’s allocated to restore a deleted user account from the Azure Active Directory recycle bin. However, Microsoft has recently allowed the option to change retention policies for deleted OneDrive profiles. You can now set maximum retention of 3,650 days or the equivalent of ten years.

This can be done through the OneDrive admin center (here) or by using the -OrphanedPersonalSitesRetentionPeriod parameter for the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet in the SharePoint Online Management Shell. For more information on using the cmdlet, see Set-SPOTenant.

If the Manager field is populated for the deleted account, the manager will receive an email message that states that the site will be removed in X days and that access to the site is granted to the manager.

If the Manager field isn’t populated for the user account and a secondary owner was configured in Setup My Sites under the User Profile section of the SharePoint admin center, the secondary owner contact will receive an email message that states that the site will be removed in 30 days and that access to the site is granted to the user. The email will be as follows:

The My Site of xxxxxx is scheduled for deletion in 30 days. As their manager, you are now the temporary owner of their site. This temporary ownership gives you access to the site to copy any business-related information you might need. To access the site use this URL:https://xxxx.sharepoint.com/personal/xxxxxxx/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx  prior to the retention period expiring, a second email message will be sent to the manager or secondary owner that states that the site will be deleted in seven days.

After seven days, the profile for the deleted account is sent to the site collection recycle bin. This data will be kept there for 93 days. Please note, during this time managers or secondary owners will NOT be able to access shared content or data. If you wish to restore the data during this period of time the One Drive account will need to be restored through PowerShell.

Recommendation 2:

It is important to remember that Microsoft is not using recommendation one as a permanent solution. The retention period options are provided to give the Manager or secondary user enough time to download the deleted user’s data to their own accounts before permanent deletion. This leads us to the process of how to move said data.

The admin must sync the data of the User A to his/her local machine (down) and then to the new User X (up). But you have to additionally look for the rights and permissions of the documents. This is not sufficient for a manual process. It is time-consuming and in no way ensures you will be able to capture all of User A’s data. But luckily there is a solution with BitTitan.

The MigrationWiz solution from BitTitan may migrate OneDrive for Business Data from any user in Office 365 to another user in Office 365, such as in our example above from User A to User X. MigrationWiz is capable of handling this scenario, in addition to several other more complicated and uncommon project types.

Learn more about how MigrationWiz handles migrating OneDrive data by reading the following article in our Knowledge Base: OneDrive for Business to OneDrive for Business Migration Guide

If you decide to migrate, you should read all sections carefully.

In the section MSPComplete Steps “How do I purchase licenses” it should be noted that this is a document migration, and will require a User Migration Bundle license. This license type handles multiple workloads in addition to documents. It also includes the following: mailbox, archives, and desktop configuration. The bundle license allows 10 passes per workload and has a 100GB data limit.

After you have migrated the data to the new user (X) and assigned him/her the rights to work in the “Marketing” and “Support” team sites, it looks like:

(Please note: MigrationWiz does not move data off the source server and onto the destination – the data will only be copied.)

Currently, manual migrations are too costly — especially when multiple users leave the company, which indeed occurs but more common in large companies. The current limitations of the sync clients (Groove.exe) make it almost impossible to synchronize large amounts of data. A migration via MigrationWiz enables you to save time, money, and resources on projects of any size and allows quick access to your data during and after the migration.

To learn more about MigrationWiz, visit BitTitan’s website.

If you have any questions you’d like answered, reach out today! Our BitTitan experts are here for you anytime.

BitTitan Webinars Presents: Top Tips for Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migrations with Coexistence

Learn more about how MigrationWiz helps you support coexistence among Office 365 tenants during long-term projects today.

The post How to Deal with Terminated Users in OneDrive for Business appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Upgrades to BitTitan MigrationWiz enable IT professionals and Microsoft Partners in China to move customers to the cloud faster with an automated Office 365 migration.

BitTitan, the developer of MigrationWiz®, today announced it is broadening its partnership with Shanghai Blue Cloud Technologies Co., Ltd (hereafter “21Vianet Blue Cloud”), the official operator and service provider of Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 in China, by making its popular MigrationWiz User Migration Bundle available in the Chinese cloud-services market.

With the cloud-computing industry experiencing significant growth worldwide, the demand for Office 365 services is rapidly increasing. The User Migration Bundle will provide Microsoft Partners and IT professionals in the Chinese market with a single solution that moves customers to the cloud faster and more securely.

Built on Microsoft Azure with Azure security, the User Migration Bundle expands the capabilities of MigrationWiz by offering mailbox, document and personal-archive migration, along with remote configuration tools for Microsoft Outlook. It allows customers to take advantage of the benefits of Microsoft Azure and additional Office 365 workloads such as mail, OneDrive and SharePoint.

“With so much growth in China’s cloud-computing market, we are delighted to be expanding our product offerings with 21Vianet Blue Cloud to enable the acceleration and adoption of Office 365,” said Geeman Yip, CEO of BitTitan. “Together, we are providing increased automation and five-star customer service to make it easier for companies in China to move to the cloud.”

Office 365, operated by 21Vianet Blue Cloud, was launched in China in 2014 and ranks number one in China’s SaaS market. 21Vianet Blue Cloud has received 11 trusted cloud certifications, the most of any cloud-services provider in China.

Available now through 21Vianet Blue Cloud, a MigrationWiz User Migration Bundle license will be good for one year, allowing companies to move to the cloud at their preferred pace, while IT professionals can drive additional revenue with the ability to move vast amounts of data per license.

“As one of the most important cloud computing solution providers in the world, BitTitan has earned a global reputation for understanding the unique needs of IT professionals as well as the immense opportunities associated with moving data to the cloud,” said Wing-Dar Ker, CEO of 21Vianet Blue Cloud. “21Vianet Blue Cloud is proud to have partnered with BitTitan for the past four years, we are confident with our cooperation and look forward to continuing our partnership and expanding our services to provide exceptional solutions to our customers in China.”

The official press release regarding this announcement can be found here.

The post BitTitan and 21Vianet Blue Cloud Expand Partnership to Meet Office 365 Growth in China appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Have you noticed a new look in the BitTitan Help Center? 

The BitTitan Customer Success team has been hard at work improving the appearance and navigation of our extensive library of migration guides and product information. We’ve also introduced a new capability called Guided Assitance to help you quickly find the articles most relevant for your project. Let’s take a closer look at these changes.

New Navigation Path

We now have articles sorted into more general topics such as Getting Started (where you can find out information about BitTitan and how to use our products), Migration Help (articles for getting help with specific questions or issues in migrations), Products (articles specifically about a single BitTitan product), and Tools (products that are used in conjunction with our main products.

The new look is set up to help make searching for and finding articles far more logical and easy.  Most articles are now sorted by environment to try to help you find answers in a more timely manner.

Introducing Guided Assistance

We’ve also have turned on a new feature for our Help Center called Guided Assistance to help you troubleshoot issues on your own time! This feature can be accessed by clicking on the Contact Support button on the lower right of the main Help Center page.  This Guided Assistance will walk you through selecting what tool you are using, what the issue is, and what some potential solution articles are available.

This approach means that you do not need to open a ticket with BitTitan Support or wait for a reply! You can find answers in a matter of minutes and continue on with your project.  When using Guided Assistance, you can select which BitTitan project you are using, which type of project you are working on, and more.

For example, you can select MigrationWiz, then Public Folders, then Migration Errors, then that the errors are coming from the Source, and that your source is Office 365.  The Guided Assistance tool will then give you a list of Help Center articles that might be relevant and helpful.

If the options provided do not help resolve the issue, you will be able to open a ticket from the Guided Assistance and our Support Engineers will be happy to help.  Opening tickets through the Guided Assistance will help us as well, as we will be able to add more links to articles that can help and refine the decision tree to provide those articles.

We do continue to refine the search results that can be presented for each option and hope that this will become even more helpful as time goes by.

Over the next several weeks, we will be making several more, small, changes to the interface for contacting support.  Stay tuned for more information and additional changes in the coming weeks to better streamline the Contact Support process.

Learn more about our support at https://www.bittitan.com/support/.

The post BitTitan Help Center Gets Navigation Redesign, Guided Assistance appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Here we go again – giving away migration secrets for FREE.

BitTitan Webinars is back this month with a new live session on June 18, 2019. During this webinar, BitTitan Sr. Technical Partner Strategist António Vargas will outline our top strategies for migrating documents to OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, or to a new SharePoint server.

Registration is divided by region – select the link below that’s right for you and reserve your spot today! Not around to attend live? We will be sure to upload this session to our growing webinar library for on-demand viewing the following week.

• Americas: Register here

• EMEA: Register here

• APAC: Register here

The post Webinar Alert: Secrets for a Successful Document Migration appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Product Release Notes contain information about updates, upgrades and new features for BitTitan solutions and services. For the most current information, visit the Product Announcements section in the BitTitan Help Center. For additional questions, visit the Community Forums.

MigrationWiz New Feature: Guided Tutorials

We are excited to announce the release of guided project creation tutorials! These guides are intended to assist customers through the initial steps of their migration project, with a focus on project creation. Naming a project, creating a customer, and setting up endpoints are all included within these modules! Please see the below list of project creation modules being released:

• Mailbox Project Creation
• Document Project Creation
• Personal Archive Project Creation
• Public Folder Project Creation

We are also releasing two additional tutorials to assist customers with their generation and redemption of coupons within MSPComplete:

• Generating a Coupon Code
• Redeeming a Coupon Code

All of these tutorials can be found under the ‘Guides’ button in the upper right-hand corner of your MSPComplete or MigrationWiz pages.

MigrationWiz New Advanced Option: “MapPermissionEmailByPairsInCustomer”

In an effort to continue expanding MigrationWiz Advanced Options, we’ve introduced a new feature to help map permissions within your project. Previously, the user could only set the Advanced Option “MapPermissionEmailByPairsInProject” but this only uses a single project as the mapping file. With this update, when a user sets the new option of “MapPermissionEmailByPairsInCustomer”, it will take all document migration projects for that specific customer and create a mapping file using all document projects under that customer. This is applicable when OneDrive or SharePoint is the Destination.

Note: If both MapPermissionEmailByPairsInProject and MapPermissionEmailByPairsInCustomer  Advanced Options are added, it will only map email permissions by pairs in the project (not specific to the Customer). Hence, it is recommended to only use one of the Advanced Options at a time.

MigrationWiz Error Message Improvement: T2T Coexistence Scenarios

MigrationWiz will now display more useful details about the error encountered during tenant-to-tenant coexistence setup.

We have also changed MigrationWiz behavior with migrating timezones. Previously, timezones were not migrated correctly causing calendar times to be off at the destination. After the fix, the timezone will be migrated after the mailbox is created during the pre-migration workflow.

MigrationWiz Bug Fix: Knowledge Base

Updated link to the correct KB article for “What will be migrated” on the “Start Full Migration” fly-out page
https://help.bittitan.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008107667-What-items-are-migrated-with-MigrationWiz

Previously, the link was incorrectly directed to another KB article for “How to run a pre-stage migration?”

The post May 2019 Product Release Notes appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

One of our most common document scoping questions deals with file conversion: that is, if I’m moving from Google Drive to OneDrive or vice versa, what format will my documents assume on the Destination? This is an important question when it comes to setting expectations with end users and ensuring they’re ready to go on Day 1 in the new environment. In this post, we’ll outline the default MigrationWiz behavior as well as select Advanced Options that adjust this outcome – and if you’re keen to learn more about document migrations, register now for our upcoming webinar. 

Google Drive to OneDrive – What Happens?

By default, MigrationWiz will automatically convert native Google document formats to their equivalent Office formats. This means Google Docs will be converted into Microsoft Word (.docx); Google Slides to Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx); and Google Sheets to Microsoft Excel (.xlsx). It also migrates Google permissions to their closest equivalents on the Microsoft side of the house (e.g., Google “public on the web” gets changed to “everyone”).

There are a few other components to be aware of during this migration. When moving from Drive to OneDrive, Google Drawings are converted into .jpg format and will not be editable once migrated. Google Forms are ignored by MigrationWiz as there is no Microsoft equivalent and so they cannot be converted.

While a big advantage of working in a cloud office suite is the potential for collaboration, much of this data doesn’t get migrated with the individual document. Components such as version history and comments do not get migrated and the document creation date is changed to the date of the migration – important to keep in mind for the sake of audit and security practices.

And the other way around? OneDrive to Drive? 

Same behavior. By default, these conversions will occur in the opposite direction so files on the Destination – in this case, Google Drive – are all in corresponding format (Docs, Sheets, Slides). Same for permissions, if applicable.

Note that in some cases, a document will contain item types that Google Drive rejects for document conversion. This occurs when the Google import tool does not support these items, and so conversion to Google format will not occur. MigrationWiz will default back to behavior where it will upload the document as binary type and maintain the original MIME type. For this reason, it’s not guaranteed that the file will be converted to Google format when migrating to Google Drive. This can also occur in Drive to Drive scenarios.

What about Drive to Drive?

This one’s a little different. Because MigrationWiz’s default behavior is to convert the file format, it will look to do so even when moving between two instances of Google Drive. If the file on the Source in Google format, it will be converted to Microsoft format when migrated. However, if the document on the Source is in Microsoft format, it will retain that format on the Destination. This is the biggest outlier scenario to be aware of during document projects with MigrationWiz.

Can I change this in MigrationWiz?

While the default is for MigrationWiz to switch format during the migration, this can be altered via Advanced Options: ShouldConvertToDestinationFormat=1. This will ensure the Source format is preserved through the migration and will work for all scenarios discussed in this post: Drive to OneDrive, OneDrive to Drive, and Drive to Drive.

For more information on document migrations and file conversions, visit the BitTitan Help Center. The corresponding KB for this particular post can be found here. 

The post Explaining Format Conversions for Document Projects with MigrationWiz appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

As we move through June and into July, all eyes focus on Inspire 2019, Microsoft’s largest annual gathering of partners happening in Las Vegas from July 14-18. Drawing over 30,000 attendees from service providers to ISVs, Inspire is the source for major partner announcements and conversations that will shape the coming year in the channel. We expect to hear more from Microsoft leading up to and at the event – Donna Goodison at CRN has a sneak peek at some of these announcements already. 

Inspire is also an opportunity for BitTitan to connect with our customers face-to-face to garner feedback on our solutions, understand new migration pain points or workloads, and lay plans for closer partnerships post-event. We’re sending an army of Titans from around the world to this year’s event and have two big announcements of our own – read on below to learn where to find the BitTitan team during Inspire 2019!

BitTitan at the Booth(s)

You read that right – booths with an “s”.  This year, BitTitan will have two booths on the expo floor!

Find the MigrationWiz team at Booth #2221, where our migration experts and The Wiz will be on-hand to answer your burning project questions, listen to feedback, and provide demos of new features released this year like Action Logging or tenant-to-tenant coexistence.

In addition, we’re debuting two new workload capabilities for MigrationWiz at Inspire. Drop by to learn about those features and get a quick demo of how we will support those projects in-product. As always, we will be running a contest at the booth with daily prizes. More on that later!

Additional workloads aren’t the only thing that’s new…BitTitan will also be unveiling a new product at Booth #2121 right next door to MigrationWiz. You won’t want to miss this announcement! Stay tuned for more news from us as the event approaches.

Celebrate 25 Years of IAMCP

The International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) and BitTitan have maintained a close relationship over the past decade, which is why we’re thrilled to be helping them celebrate their 25th anniversary at Inspire 2019. As the Gold Sponsor, it’s our favorite way to kick off this amazing week with partners from around the globe.

There’s only one way to celebrate this milestone. Join us Sunday, July 14th at Auereole in Mandalay Bay, immediately following the Inspire 2019 Welcome Reception. We’ll celebrate with drinks, food, entertainment and some very special guests from 8-11pm. Register for this event by visiting the IAMCP booth in the Community Hub, at the MigrationWiz booth (#2221), or online at https://iamcpinspire.org/25thparty/. Registration and conference badges are required to attend.

Let’s Meet!

Need more time than just a driveby at the booth to meet with our team? Great! We’d love to book time with your team to drill down. Reach out to your BitTitan account representative today – or set up an appointment here. We’ll make sure a member of our team attending Inspire gets in touch to schedule something.

Stay tuned for more news and promotions from BitTitan leading up to this event. See you in Vegas!

The post Inspire 2019 Preview: Where to Find BitTitan appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Got a migration project on the horizon? Plan ahead and pick up free User Migration Bundle licenses today!

For a limited time, BitTitan is giving away an additional 10 free UMB licenses for every 50 purchased. This offer is good through Friday, June 28, 2019 (5:00 PM PDT) or while supplies last! Free licenses will be deposited into your BitTitan account in August 2019. See full terms and conditions here. 

The User Migration Bundle from BitTitan enables the migration of a user’s mailbox, documents, and personal archives in addition to our automatic Outlook configuration tool, DeploymentPro. The license is good for 12 months, allowing you to migrate different workloads or departments at the pace that makes the most sense for your business case.

Don’t have a BitTitan account? That’s ok. Register for free with no credit card required.

Don’t miss out on this offer. Claim your free licenses today!

The post UMBundle Blitz! Get Your Free MigrationWiz Licenses Today appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Office 365 Tenant Migrations: Best Practices is a three-part series on Bits & Bytes featuring expert advice from Nero Blanco, an IT service provider in the UK specialising in end-to-end migrations. Check back later this week for parts II and III.

Are you in the UK and want to learn more about Office 365 tenant migration and security? Join experts from Nero Blanco, BitTitan, and cloud security partner CoreView for a breakfast briefing from 9:30am-noon on July 4, 2019 at the London Victoria. RSVP to BitTitan’s James Clifford now – spots fill up quickly!

Given the growth of Microsoft Office 365, tenant-to-tenant migrations were inevitable and have become more and more frequent. Tenant-to-tenant migrations have essentially become the new Exchange and AD migrations we all know and love from the last 15 years.

That said, whilst the tenant migration has become necessary, unless you are a born in the Cloud organisations, you will almost certainly have some on-premises work to do as well. This will be in the Active Directory space for sure, and may involve migrating Users & Computers, Applications, GPOs and other resources.  The internal non-IT work is not trivial so the whole project wrapper needs to be properly transitioned, change has to be managed effectively.  The Prosci ADKAR model has gained a lot of momentum in recent times and perhaps should be factored into the overall project.

So, whilst T2T is front and centre, it’s certainly not the end of the story for many organisations.

So Why Are Organizations Migrating Between Office 365 Tenants?

Well, nothing has changed much from pure business point of view right?  Businesses are still growing and acquiring / merging.  Some businesses are being broken up due to a divestiture, broken away or spun-off.  Perhaps regulatory requirements have enforced a split.

Here are a few of the main reasons we have seen:

• Mergers / Consolidation
• Acquisitions
• Divestures
• Spin-Offs
• Geography-driven decisions to meet data residency requirements
  • Although Microsoft does now offer multi-geo tenants, this is available only to customers with a minimum of 2,5000 Office 365 seats.
• Regulatory / Compliance
• Rebranding
• Rename of the Tenant
  • Again, Microsoft does have some support around this now and will consider it by special request.
• Migrate from a Test / Dev to Production

Whatever the reason, tenant-to-tenant migrations require a considerable understanding of what you will and will not get from Microsoft in terms of assistance, 3rd party tools capabilities and of course IT Consulting Services from trusted professionals to bring this all together.  That’s where Nero Blanco comes in.  We can help transition you through the whole process whilst keeping your end users productive.

Migration Tools: What Are Your Options?

Microsoft

You would think that with all these never-ending corporate mergers and takeovers in the business world that Microsoft would have a ready-made solution for consolidations of their own IT platform – especially a platform where they have been very strict about connected client versions, configurations and third-party connectivity.

In September last year (2018) we became aware of the Exchange Online Cross-Tenant Mailbox Move Preview Program:

The Exchange Online Cross-Tenant Mailbox Move Preview Program is designed to validate new features in Exchange Online by having customers test migration scenarios using pre-release features in Exchange Online.  The program gives participants the opportunity to provide feedback to the Exchange product development team.

So not strictly designed as a tenant migration tool, more of a ‘test new features tool’.  It’s not available to everyone on General Availability and even so, it only concerns itself with Mailboxes, which is only one piece of the Office 365 puzzle – and quite frankly that is the low hanging fruit.  Exchange mailbox migrations are quite straight forward.  When you consider all that has to be done, you can quickly discount this as anything useful.

Now, we’re sure that with enough heavy hitters in this space Microsoft will perhaps relent and provide tooling for their biggest and best customers but given the rate of change in Office 365 and the roll out of new workloads to the service, it would require a lot of maintenance.  It took a long time for Microsoft to bring Exchange Migrations to the product via PowerShell New-MoveRequest. And, is there really a good AD Migration tool from Microsoft?  ADMT anyone?

So personally, I’m guessing that a Microsoft inspired tenant-to-tenant tool may be a long time coming.  And as for Coexistence… well, more about that later.

3rd Party Migration Tools

With a technology gap to fill, the free market always delivers.  A number of vendors have now inevitably provided a solution to the problem.

You need to decide what features and functionality are important to you, because we have seen that whilst many vendors are operating in this space, they all have their strong suits and their weaknesses.  Very few tools for example migrate SharePoint versions.  One vendor explained that the performance hit on the tool was too great and outweighed the genuine needs and request of customers.

We personally love MigrationWiz by BitTitan.  We’ve been doing migrations with BitTitan for some years now.  We like the simplicity of the interface.  It’s cloud-based so we don’t need to stand any kit up.  The migration throughput is second to none.  Their support is absolutely first class as is their documentation and knowledgebase articles.

Using Quality Consultants

However fast and reliable a migration toolset is, it is only one part of the puzzle.  The overarching steps to complete the migration requires a whole lot more.  Business buy-in, scheduling, planning, project management, transition management all has to be factored in.  Pretty much all players in the IT department will have some input.

If you are merging organisations there is for sure going to be some political hurdles that may slow your project down.  There will be timings for public announcements rebranding and pretty much all the usual soft skills required at the business and corporate governance levels.

This is where good consultants who know this process come in to play and can provide proper planning and understanding to the project for the key stakeholders and ultimately the end users.

Downtime

In all scenarios you must accept that there will be some downtime, however small.  Our advice: Accept a level of pain.  Hoping for a zero user-impact migration is just not possible.  Good consultants can minimise this with solid preparation and efficient cutover delivery.

Where a SMTP domain is being taken over (as part of a cutover migration) then there comes a time when you must stop the mail flow and cut-over the DNS records.  Even if your MX records are pointing to an appliance that can pause mail flow and hold incoming mail, it is still not reaching your end users.

In certain acquisition scenarios this may be moot of course, as the acquiring company may not care about the old branding, in which case the legacy tenant can have the forwarding enabled.

A merger / acquisition where the SMTP Domain name is being moved is going to be more complicated.  Re-creating any mail rules, DNS configurations for MX, DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Organisation sharing, will all take time and are directly affected by the tenant being available.

For further reading on DNS, check out these links:

• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)
• Sender Protection Framework (SPF)

Removing all traces of a Domain name from the source tenant can take some time to complete as well as then re-populating objects in the target with the correct UPNs, Primary SMTP Addresses, and proxyAddresses.

In a coexisted world, there may be no downtime for mail.  However, that is possibly the least of the worries in that scenario!  Those users still need to recreate the Outlook and OneDrive profiles.

To do this, users must re-create their Outlook and OneDrive profiles either on the workstations or mobile devices.  In some situation’s users may even have to be advised of their new username and password through an appropriate mechanism, hopefully in advance.

The amount of downtime or outages will be proportionate to the size of the organisation and the workloads, and particularly the type of migration.

Communication, Helpdesk, and Documentation

Communicating in advance in clear details to your end users is crucial to stave off calls.

Ensuring the Helpdesk and Support Professionals are completely engaged and across the project is vitality important.  Documentation will inevitably need to be updated as soon as is practical.

The post Office 365 Tenant Migrations: Best Practices from Nero Blanco IT (Part 1) appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Office 365 Tenant Migrations: Best Practices is a three-part series on Bits & Bytes featuring expert advice from Nero Blanco, an IT service provider in the UK specialising in end-to-end migrations. Read part one of this series here.

Are you in the UK and want to learn more about Office 365 tenant migration and security? Join experts from Nero Blanco, BitTitan, and cloud security partner CoreView for a breakfast briefing from 9:30am-noon on July 4, 2019 at the London Victoria. RSVP to BitTitan’s James Clifford now – spots fill up quickly!

In part one of this series, we reviewed the catalysts for a tenant to tenant migration project as well as your options for executing this type of project successfully. In part two, we’re reviewing key considerations in the pre-migration phase.

Migration Considerations

Key People

Sounds obvious, right? Have access to the DNS and Network Admins, the AD and AAD Connect Admins, the IT Security Team and so on. It’s amazing who you might need on the cutover event. In fact, as already stated, pretty much all of IT will be involved in some way, shape, or form.

Identity

Common Global Address List (GAL) – Getting the identity design right is critical and should be established before undertaking ANY migration or coexistence steps.  Almost certainly your organization will need a unified Global Address List.

Surfacing users as “Mail Contacts” in each tenant is relatively easy with PowerShell but what about Distribution Lists, Shared Mailboxes and Rooms/Resources.  Objects from each tenant should really be created as Mail-Enabled Users so that they can access resources and can be licensed to Mailboxes.  Having Guest accounts in Office 365 with a Contact of the same name is problematic.

Synchronising identities to a common platform should be the number one task.  In a merger/acquisition if both organisations are using On-Premise Active Directory and both running AAD Connect then all identity changes need to happen on-premises and flow to AD.  Directory sync needs to be AD to AD to surface each other’s objects.  On cutover, this needs careful planning as simply switching off current Sync and Federation tools (or descoping objects) could have a catastrophic impact as they might get deleted from the tenant they are syncing to.

Therefore, a robust and mature sync tool is a must.  Nero Blanco have written their own Directory Synchronization tool for this purpose called PowerSyncPro that has been designed from the ground up with tenant-to-tenant migrations in mind.

Guest Accounts and Mail Contacts – If the Exchange Mail Contact exists already, then you cannot create the Guest account, but you can vice versa.  This is because the Guest object is synced to Exchange Online (from MSOL /AAD) with proxyAddresses populated so after that you cannot use that proxy in any Exchange Online objects.  i.e. Contacts, Mail-Enabled Users, Mailboxes.  This is important because the migration tools will attempt to add permissions on initial and/or delta syncs.

In Office 365 when a Guest user is added to a resource, the Guest is sent an email invitation.  If you are pre-staging data then the timing of this is very important, because you may not want that invite going out 6 weeks before cut-over, because that target data is not “end user ready” yet.

Thus. the timing of creating Guests accounts that get added to Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business is very important.

Security

Likewise, security requirements.  This should be agreed and nailed down before starting down the road of merging organisations.  Different organisations almost certainly will have had differing security requirements for corporate data protection.  New Identity sign-on sophistication may be required for privileged user accounts and enabling Multi-Factor Authentication and compliance requirements for users and devices.  Conditional Access will probably be on for Admins, and even enabled org wide on one or the other tenant.

Note: You cannot migrate EMS Intune policies and Azure Information Protection (AIP) configuration.  Nor DLP and Exchange Transport Rules.  These all need to be re-created with collaboration and agreement from both organisations.

Sharing Policies

Configuring sharing policies in Office 365 whilst not quite a dark art, is definitely something that needs planning and documenting.  Sharing can be configured at these levels:

• Azure AD – External collaboration settings
• Exchange Online
• SharePoint:
  • Sharing outside your organization / Who can share outside your organization
  • Default link type / Default link permission
  • Additional settings
  • Notifications
• OneDrive for Business
• Teams – External Access and Guest Access

Also consider other policies such as Compliance Polices, Data loss prevention (DLP), Messaging records management (MRM) and In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold, Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Intune EMS, Azure Information Protection.

Interim Coexistence

Avoid this if at all possible – it is not easy or straight forward. Always try to go cutover. And if a cutover migration isn’t an option, then…

Coexistence for Enterprise Customers: Sometimes it just will not be possible to perform a cutover migration because the user base is simply too large.  Therefore, interim coexistence may be required.  Cross Tenant Organisational Sharing and Routing can be set-up relatively easily where Domain names are not being shared, but when you need to have a common Domain name it’s a lot more difficult.

There are a few 3^rd party vendors out there offering a coexistence solution of sorts, but it is mainly: routing, Free-Busy and DirSync you will be getting.  The routing and Free Busy concepts still relay on Target Routing Domains being set either as targetAddresses on Mail-Enabled Users and Contacts, or SMTP Forwarders on Mailboxes (but the presence of a mailbox will break Free Busy).  External emails will have to be processed first by an appliance such as Mimecast etc that can do recipient based routing re-writes, and likewise outbound routing re-writes, as the primary SMTP address for a user may not actually be the common Domain name.

Understanding the limitations affecting workloads is crucial to ensure end user impact is minimalised.  Particularly your end users being trained and understanding which account to log on with where when they are accessing a shared resource like SharePoint, Teams or OneDrive files.

Reasons to avoid coexistence and things to consider:

• Primary Domain name can only be attached to one tenant at a time
  • A choice has to be made will that be the Source or Target
• Mail Routing to primary domain name
  • Per above, needs a 3^rd party appliance
• Free Busy
  • 3^rd Party Free Busy broker service
  • Requires a well thought out use of targetAddress and AvailabilityAddressSpace (but won’t work when the Mailbox exists in the source)
• Mailbox delegation between migrated and non-migrated users does not work
• Ongoing GAL synchronisation
  • Tooling that can cope with on-going steady state AD to AD synchronisation
  • Source to Target Migrated objects in the Cloud require on-premises AD attribute changes
• Teams
  • Users will have to contend with Organisation Switching, and will effectively be a Guest to some materials at one point or another.

User Confusion

• Which UPN logon to use for migrated users accessing back to non-migrated data
  • Different Password – how / where to change
• Which UPN logon to use for non-migrated users accessing migrated data types
  • Different Password – how / where to change
• Guest Accounts

Data Discovery and Workloads

A key consideration in deciding to do a tenant-to-tenant migration is identifying what data your organization actually needs to move AND how MUCH data you have.  Huge amounts of data can take a long time to migrate.  Don’t forget, this is all content migrating over WANs – “Cloud to Cloud”.

Initially people think of a tenant migration as just moving email and documents from SharePoint and OneDrive, but actually Office 365 and Azure AD is complete platform in its own right.  It is by now deeply integrated into your IT infrastructure and processes.

Plus, not ALL workloads can actually be migrated, i.e. Yammer.  So make sure all stakeholders understand what data and features are going to be available to each set of users.

So, before you start a tenant migration, spend some time figuring out what data you have in Office 365, and if you can migrate it or not.  At the bare minimum you need to know the SMTP domain names that are cutting over and the full list of users and objects migrating.  Not forgetting there may be a mix of On-Premises and Cloud only objects.

• Make sure that you take a FULL EXPORT of the source objects including all attributes. This will need to be run from on-premises and Cloud
  • Beware of username and group name conflicts

Then things like:

• Any special routing topologies and Rules, Connectors, DLP, Federation, Message Hygiene
• Mail-Enabled Users, User Mailboxes, Shared Mailboxes, Room and Equipment, Distribution Groups, Mail-Enabled Security Groups, External Mail Contacts
• Mailbox Delegation Exports
  • SendAs, Send on Behalf Of, and Full Access
• Litigation Hold
  • Export this and ready to re-apply
• SharePoint Sites and Teams
• OneDrive for Business Personal Sites
  • OneDrive for Business Quotas

You need to know all this so that you can re-create it all in the target in advance so that the migration tools have an endpoint to deposit data.

So is it just email, SharePoint and OneDrive?

Nope, not anymore. Consider all these things:

Licensing, Payment Methods, Identity, OneDrive for Business, Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics, Azure, SMTP Domain names, DNS Changes, ADFS, Message Hygiene, Disclaimers, Signatures, Transport Rules, Federation, DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Data Leakage Protection, Azure Information Protection, Mail Routing with Partners, Compliance, RBAC, AAD Connect, Shared Mailboxes, Litigation/Legal Hold, Retention Policies, Rooms & Resources, Active Directory Sync, Distribution Groups, External Mail Contacts, Guest Access, MDM/MAM, Enterprise Mobility & Security, Windows 10 Licensing, Intune Compliance, Deskless Workers, Staff Hub, Planner, Sway, Advanced Threat Protection, Backups, Mobile Devices, Office ProPlus, Yammer, Sharing Policies, Conditional Access, MFA, Global Administration, Role Based Administration, Hybrid Exchange and Coexistence, Public Folders, SMTP Relays Skype for Business, VoIP, Calling Plans, Education, Not for Profit, Geo Restrictions, Network and Latency, ADFS, ExpressRoute, Monitoring, PowerBI, SSPR, Reporting…

Devices

Never forget that it is not just Microsoft Windows AD Domain joined machines consuming your data.  Today’s users probably have at least 2 devices (sometimes even more than four!) with Phones, Tablets, Desktops, Laptops and home PCs in the mix.

Reconfiguring devices is often not trivial for basic users.  New policies may be applied creating unexpected and unwanted results.

Active Directory

Although the focus here is tenant-to-tenant migrations, unless you are a born in the Cloud organisation, chances are that you have some underlying Active Directory to deal with too.  At some point you are going to need to migrate Users and Computers and Applications and maybe even decommission one of the ADs.

The post Office 365 Tenant Migrations: Best Practices from Nero Blanco IT (Part 2) appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Office 365 Tenant Migrations: Best Practices is a three-part series on Bits & Bytes featuring expert advice from Nero Blanco, an IT service provider in the UK specialising in end-to-end migrations. Read part one of this series here.

In parts two and three of this series, we covered important pre-migration considerations as an Office 365 tenant migration approaches. In the final installment, we summarize those steps and walk through a T2T scenario, applying those considerations to our plan and reviewing lessons learned.

Summary

If an Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration is on your horizon then good planning and defining your final goals are critical.

• Pick your workloads
• What is needed for compliance
• External Sharing
• Avoid Coexistence
• Pick the appropriate tool(s) and partner(s)

Getting the identity design is critical and should be established before undertaking ANY migration or coexistence steps.  Likewise, security requirements.  This should be agreed and nailed down before starting down the road of merging organisations.

Understand how MUCH data you have.  Huge amounts of data can take a long time to migrate.

Make sure all stakeholders understand what data and features are going to be available to each set of users.  E.g.  if the management team expects Yammer data to be migrated, then you will need to manage expectations and set goals before you get started.

You are going to have to rely on good planning, 3^rd party tools, manual tools and IT Consulting Services from trusted professionals, and that’s where Nero Blanco comes in.

Working Example: Simple Divestiture Scenario

Here we are spinning off Fabrikam Limited from the parent Company (source tenant) “Contoso Holdings”.  Contoso Holdings is an agile start-up and was born in the Cloud.  They have no on-premises infrastructure.  Fabrikam will be going it alone and are only interested in migrating off Email and OneDrive data for users.

Prepare Target Tenant

• Create and configure tenant
  • onmicrosoft.com created
• Primary domain(s) added to the target tenant
• Administration and Migration Service Accounts created appropriately
• Policy and Configuration Alignment, including
  • Maximum Message Size, Quotas
  • Disclaimers / Signatures
  • Retention / DLP Policies
  • Transport Rules

Prepare Identity

Use PowerShell script to create the following in the target tenant

• Users (licenced appropriately)
  • Some attributes may be crucial, like authentication mobile phone number
• External Contacts
• Shared Mailboxes
• Resource Mailboxes: Rooms/Equipment
• Distribution Groups and Security Groups
  • We always recommend an email enabled security group hidden from the GAL for mailbox delegation Groups where we set Full Access and Send As (with mailbox auditing)

NOTE: some tools require running Request-SPOPersonalSite to create the destination OneDrive site.  MigrationWiz does this for you automatically

Prepare Migration Environment

• Ensure your migration service accounts have Global Admin Access, impersonation is enabled (if required), SharePoint Administrator maybe required in some instances
  • Some tools you may use an Azure App Service Account
• Buy MigrationWiz licences (the User Migration Bundle is a 12-month unlimited data per user licence!)
• Setup the MigrationWiz project
• Create your migration jobs (avoid using domains that you are going to move)
• Verify the Administration Credentials
• Deploy DeploymentPro to Workstations

“DeploymentPro configures Outlook email profiles to the new Destination server and moves users’ AutoComplete, email signatures, and PST files to the reconfigured email profile”

• Run the Pre-stage migrations
• Resolve Errors

Cutover Weekend: Source Tenant

• Pause inbound mail delivery (MX or 3^rd party)
• Ensure the default domain is NOT fabrikam.com
• Remove the fabrikam.com domain from all objects in Source
  • Cloud only objects, the tenant can do this for you up to 500 users
• Remove fabrikam.com from the tenant

* This can take some time pending Office 365 processing of the above steps

Cutover Weekend: Target Tenant

• Verify fabrikam.com
• Set fabrikam.com to be the “Default Domain”
• Update all the target objects (email address, proxyAddresses and UPN)
• Resume inbound mail delivery (MX or 3^rd party)

Cutover Weekend: Final Pieces

• Run the final Sync in MigrationWiz
• Resolve any errors
• Reconfigure Phones and Tablets
• Run DeploymentPro for Outlook on Workstations
• Apply Retention/Litigation Hold if required
• Office
  • Users need to log out and back in
• OneDrive for Business
  • Users need to unlink their PC and then add OneDrive back in choosing the same folder
• Disable all end-user access to the source tenant

Lessons Learned

Expectation Setting

• URLs change for SharePoint Teams, and OneDrive so previous embedded links won’t work (e.g. in emails or documentation)
• Team meeting URLs in Calendar meetings change
  • If the legacy tenant exists, users will in fact have their meetings over there!
• Users missing data?
  • Navigate back to the legacy tenant via the browser for OWA, SharePoint to the tenant that the user does not have configured on their workstation to access/check
• Devices not configured or failed to configure?
  • Use OWA until resolved
• Only take the minimum workloads and data required
• Expect a level of downtime during cutover
• Understand the Migration tools limitations and quirks and how to work around them
  • There will be an element of manual scripting and tweaking

Preparation

• Make sure you have access to make DNS changes BEFORE you remove the domain name from the source tenant!
  • Otherwise you can’t prove ownership of the tenant by adding the MX record. Now your email is stranded
• Use a Licensed Global Administration account that does not have MFA or Conditional Access applied (for the duration of the migration) and is using a *.onmicosoft.com UPN
• Have enough target Office 365 licences (of the right type) – plus a buffer
• Not all migration tools take across SharePoint and OneDrive versions, nor design and workflow
• Beware you might need to make a Microsoft Service Request to relax some throttling settings
• OneDrive for Business quotas need to be same or higher in the target
• Don’t use the domain you are moving in any mapping files – use the *.onmicosoft.com alias
  • When you remove it, the migration tools won’t recognise the user in the target
• Don’t forget about mailbox delegation
• Don’t forget about mailbox Litigation Hold

Identity

• Beware of Source and Target Active Directory password complexity policies when performing a Directory Sync
  • Password complexity needs to be the same or lower for DirSync in the target
• Beware of AAD Connect custom attributes and mappings
• Beware of GAL name clashes for Merger/Acquisition projects
  • What to do for Groups (merge/rename)
  • Users – someone must give up their Primary SMTP Address and UPN
• Remove licences from the source to avoid ongoing charges!
• Understand how Guest Access works. You may need to create Guest accounts

Keep It Simple and Sensible

• Avoid a staged / batched migration at all costs. Coexistence is never easy/cheap
• Pre-stage Data
  • When pre-staging data bear in mind that most tools don’t do sync updates and deletions very well. e. filing, mark read/unread, categorisation.  We recommend pre-staging something like:
    • email older than 30 days
    • ODfB/SP older than 90 days
  • Have a list of Key Contacts for the client close to hand at time of cutover. g. AD Admins, AAD Connect Admins, Network/DNS Admins, Office 365 Admins, IT Security Admins
  • Remove end user access to the source tenant
    • As in actually de-license and block user
  • Use BitTitan DeploymentPro and MigrationWiz
  • Use Nero Blanco

About Nero Blanco IT

Highly skilled and experienced independent contractors formed Nero Blanco, when we saw an opportunity to change the way large technology migration and consolidation programmes are delivered. We wanted to help organisations with mixed IT environments to make a seamless transition to the latest technology.

For us, no two projects are the same. We take a new perspective for every project we work on. Our solutions are tailored to fit your challenges, whilst keeping in mind cost, efficiency and maintaining a highly personal level of support. We relish the challenge of making your migration as smooth and painless as possible. Our goal is the timely delivery of an end-to-end technology solution that will dramatically improve your performance results.

Our expert team can help companies like yours to easily migrate from the old to the new and we hold the following accreditations:

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Whether you’re migrating to OneDrive, SharePoint, or simply upgrading on-prem instances, MigrationWiz is here to help. Configure and launch document migration projects in minutes from the same easy-to-use interface as mailbox migrations while maintaining file hierarchy, permissions, and more.

Watch the on-demand webinar to hear our technology expert share his best-kept secrets for document migrations and ways to ensure success during your next project.

Click here to watch this on-demand webinar now!

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If a user leaves the company and their account is deleted, and/or their license is withdrawn, what happens with the business data in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business? 

We’ve discussed how to deal with terminated users in Office 365 in a previous post. But when SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are the Source and Destination, it can present a new set of obstacles. What migration methods exist that can handle such a scenario?

First, here’s an illustration that maps out the scenario:

For all team sites in SharePoint Online, the company has a storage of 10 GB + 500 MB for each user for free. Additional storage may be purchased.

In OneDrive for Business, each user with a license has 1 TB storage, and later on this year unlimited storage. The illustration shows that User A is a member of the Team Sites “Marketing” and “Support”. Additionally, User A also has shared folders and files with User B and C, but he is the owner.

The company does not have to pay for the the storage of OneDrive for Business. It is becoming increasingly popular to switch content to OneDrive without ultimately considering the consequences.

In our example, User A leaves the company. The administrator deletes User A in the Active Directory and/or withdraws the Office 365 license.

There is no problem with the two team sites because User A no longer exists. But in Office 365, there will be an automatic process initiated called “My Site Cleanup Job.” Microsoft has more details on this at KB 3042522.

The short version: Microsoft has two recommendations for saving the users content.

Recommendation 1

A work or school account is deleted from the Microsoft Office 365 admin center or is removed through Active Directory synchronization.

The account deletion is synchronized to SharePoint Online.

The OneDrive Clean Up Job runs, and the user profile is marked for deletion. The user profile will be preserved in the database in a deleted state for 30 days by default. This coincides with the time that’s allocated to restore a deleted user account from the Azure Active Directory recycle bin. However, Microsoft has recently allowed the option to change retention policies for deleted OneDrive profiles. You can now set maximum retention of 3,650 days or the equivalent of ten years.

This can be done through the OneDrive admin center (here) or by using the -OrphanedPersonalSitesRetentionPeriod parameter for the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet in the SharePoint Online Management Shell. For more information on using the cmdlet, see Set-SPOTenant.

If the Manager field is populated for the deleted account, the manager will receive an email message that states that the site will be removed in X days and that access to the site is granted to the manager.

If the Manager field isn’t populated for the user account and a secondary owner was configured in Setup My Sites under the User Profile section of the SharePoint admin center, the secondary owner contact will receive an email message that states that the site will be removed in 30 days and that access to the site is granted to the user. The email will be as follows:

The My Site of xxxxxx is scheduled for deletion in 30 days. As their manager, you are now the temporary owner of their site. This temporary ownership gives you access to the site to copy any business-related information you might need. To access the site use this URL:https://xxxx.sharepoint.com/personal/xxxxxxx/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx  prior to the retention period expiring, a second email message will be sent to the manager or secondary owner that states that the site will be deleted in seven days.

After seven days, the profile for the deleted account is sent to the site collection recycle bin. This data will be kept there for 93 days. Please note, during this time managers or secondary owners will NOT be able to access shared content or data. If you wish to restore the data during this period of time the One Drive account will need to be restored through PowerShell.

Recommendation 2:

It is important to remember that Microsoft is not using recommendation one as a permanent solution. The retention period options are provided to give the Manager or secondary user enough time to download the deleted user’s data to their own accounts before permanent deletion. This leads us to the process of how to move said data.

The admin must sync the data of the User A to his/her local machine (down) and then to the new User X (up). But you have to additionally look for the rights and permissions of the documents. This is not sufficient for a manual process. It is time-consuming and in no way ensures you will be able to capture all of User A’s data. But luckily there is a solution with BitTitan.

The MigrationWiz solution from BitTitan may migrate OneDrive for Business Data from any user in Office 365 to another user in Office 365, such as in our example above from User A to User X. MigrationWiz is capable of handling this scenario, in addition to several other more complicated and uncommon project types.

Learn more about how MigrationWiz handles migrating OneDrive data by reading the following article in our Knowledge Base: OneDrive for Business to OneDrive for Business Migration Guide

If you decide to migrate, you should read all sections carefully.

In the section MSPComplete Steps “How do I purchase licenses” it should be noted that this is a document migration, and will require a User Migration Bundle license. This license type handles multiple workloads in addition to documents. It also includes the following: mailbox, archives, and desktop configuration. The bundle license allows 10 passes per workload and has a 100GB data limit.

After you have migrated the data to the new user (X) and assigned him/her the rights to work in the “Marketing” and “Support” team sites, it looks like:

(Please note: MigrationWiz does not move data off the source server and onto the destination – the data will only be copied.)

Currently, manual migrations are too costly — especially when multiple users leave the company, which indeed occurs but more common in large companies. The current limitations of the sync clients (Groove.exe) make it almost impossible to synchronize large amounts of data. A migration via MigrationWiz enables you to save time, money, and resources on projects of any size and allows quick access to your data during and after the migration.

To learn more about MigrationWiz, visit BitTitan’s website.

If you have any questions you’d like answered, reach out today! Our BitTitan experts are here for you anytime.

BitTitan Webinars Presents: Top Tips for Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migrations with Coexistence

Learn more about how MigrationWiz helps you support coexistence among Office 365 tenants during long-term projects today.

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Like it or not, Microsoft Teams is here to stay.

The rise of workstream collaboration platforms – namely Teams and chief rival Slack – have seen tremendous growth over the last 18 months. In December 2018, Microsoft announced Teams adoption surpassed that of Slack and was optimistically predicting its presence in the workplace would double by 2020. Gartner concurs, estimating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 96%  for the entire workstream collaboration market through 2021 for a grand market total of $5 billion.

For Office 365 users, it’s a difficult application to avoid. From an aggressive feature roadmap to a strongarm “you’re going to have this on your machine” approach, Office 365 users are being funneled towards its functionality. Microsoft is clear Teams is on track to replace Skype of Business, while some longer-term visions look to a future where Teams succeeds email as the standard communication vehicle at the internal level.

So what’s this mean for IT? For starters, it’s yet another application to govern and manage – challenges we’ve heard frequently via analyst calls and our own partner conversations. From a migration perspective, it’s becoming another key workload requirement in Office 365 tenant migration scenarios.

Recently, BitTitan introduced capabilities to migrate Teams to a new Office 365 tenant. You can read more about that scenario in this feature spotlight. And while we hear the groans of the anti-Teams crowd, we also recognize new demand for Teams migrations among early adopters and see the flood of these projects coming in the near future. But why should you care?

Adoption = Opportunity

Organizations that have made the leap to Teams now have important information stored in that instance and the underlying SharePoint framework. Should they need to migrate, that data now needs to be migrated, too. The frequency of Office 365 tenant migrations is only increasing as more users move to the cloud office suite. Merger, acquisition, and divestiture activity continues to fuel these scenarios as well.

The opportunity here is to expand the scope of your tenant-to-tenant migration services to include a new workload that’s becoming a central part of how end users work. Adding Teams to your migration package allows you to increase potential revenue while delivering new services that provide a more holistic migration experience for end users.

Why MigrationWiz?

Not all migration solutions are created equally. Through our unique approach to Teams projects, we offer three key benefits as you add this to your list of supported services:

Preserve Customer IP and Data

As end users turn to Teams, more critical data, conversations, and decisions will be made within the application. That data is now just as important as other file repositories or messages in an inbox. With MigrationWiz, you’re able to offer a solution to save that information – in whatever form it was created – and transfer that to a new tenant. MigrationWiz also preserves the audit trail by migrating timestamps and watermarking conversations from the previous tenant.

Standardize Your Process NOW

Teams migration projects will increase as adoption grows. Developing efficient, reliable processes for this scenario is important to ensure your projects are profitable and repeatable across customers. MigrationWiz makes it easy to standardize with a simple, consistent project flow and fast configuration phase.

Win with MigrationWiz

By bringing MigrationWiz into the new business process, we help you compete with other service providers to support common T2T business cases like mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. Adding Teams as a supported workload in your migration bid will help you compete and win this business. Let us help you.

Learn More

For more information regarding Teams migration projects and MigrationWiz, visit the Teams page on our website or watch this short demo video to see how to quickly configure and launch these projects in a matter of minutes.

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